Page 418 - ProShow Producer Manual

418 16. Masks & Adjustment Layers

Preview the slide and you'll see that your underlying image or video will fill
the word "Mask" that you added as your text layer.

To make the slide more interesting, try adding some motion effects to one
or both of the layers.

Also, try taking advantage of one of the unique attributes of Text Layers by
going back to the Text Settings tab and changing the attributes or the text
itself.

Masking Versus Borders and Frames

You may be asking yourself “Why would I use a mask when I can just add a
transparent border or frame to my slide and get basically the same thing?”
Masks trump borders in one major way – they're completely flexible. Look at
it this way:

You want to make a heart similar to what you saw above. Rather than using
a mask, you’re just going to create a heart image with some transparency
and drop that into place. This avoids masking, but you will run into some
limitations. What happens when you want to move your heart around on
the slide? Rather than just centering the heart, you want it to actually move
from place to place.

With a frame, you will see the edges of the frame and your effect will be
ruined. You can’t move that frame much at all without hitting limitations.
To make things worse, what if you wanted to move the frame and the
image? What if you’re using multiple images? All of those will cause you to
worry about where the edges of the frame are located.